6 G. G. Hubbard — lite Evolution of Commerce. 



they did not, like Rome, give wise and equitable laws and a stable 

 government to the countries they conquered. 



The Netherlands. 



The inhabitants of the Netherlands were manufacturers, and 

 supplied the markets of Spain and Portugal and their colonies, 

 thus reaping as large profits from their trade with these coun- 

 tries as the Spanish and Portuguese from the iiiines of gold and 

 silver. 



No part of Europe, says Motley, seemed so unlikely to become 

 the home of a great nation as the low country on the north- 

 western coast of the continent, where the great rivers, the Rhine 

 and Scheldt, emptied into the North sea, and where it was hard to 

 tell whether it was land or water. In this region, outcast of ocean 

 and earth, a little nation wrested from both doinains their richest 

 treasures. 



The commerce of the Hanseatic towns, Avhich had depended 

 for their trade on Venice and Genoa, became less and less as the 

 glory of those cities waned. Antwerp, with its deep and con- 

 venient rivers, stretched its arms to the ocean and caught the 

 golden harvest as it fell from its sisters' grasp. No city, except 

 Paris, surpassed it in population, none approached it in splendor. 

 It became the commercial center and banker of Europe ; five 

 thousand merchants daily assembled on its exchange ; twenty- 

 five hundred vessels were oftei> seen at once in its harbor, and 

 five hundred daily made their entrance into it. The manufact- 

 ures of Flanders and the Netherlands had been noted for many 

 generations, and now vastly increased and were distributed 

 all over the world. The Netherlands, though the smallest, be- 

 came the wealthiest nation of Europe. Then came the long- 

 continued war with Spain, ending in the siege and fall of Ant- 

 werp and in the imposition of such taxation as no other country 

 had ever endured. As Antwerp had grown on the ruins of the 

 Hanseatic towns, so her fall became England's gain. 



France and. England. 



In America, north of Mexico, neither silver nor gold had been 

 found to tempt the Spanish and Portuguese. The larger portion 

 of the northern Atlantic coast was one long sand beach, broken 

 by great estuaries and the mouths of great rivers ; the rest was 



